Ramkumar Venkataraman, Senior Vice President at Moody's Corporation, discussed how organizations can make themselves "operationally productive" during a presentation at the 2014 Chief Information Officer Leadership Forum: Spotlight on Financial Services in New York on Sept. 9. In his presentation, Venkataraman described what it takes for an organization to develop an effective operational plan and boost its productivity.

According to Venkataraman, there is a fundamental difference between process and procedure. Productivity can be difficult to measure, Venkataraman said, but an organization that has an operational plan in place can ensure its workers are productive and efficient: "If you try to measure productivity and you try very hard to measure it, you are going to affect productivity negatively. Companies go and spend a lot of time and effort in doing function point analysis and doing lines of code ... Your organization is productive when they’re really productive. When they’re productive, you really don’t need to measure."

Application agnostic development teams are important for organizations of all sizes, Venkataraman said. Creating a "common resource pool," Venkataraman added, can help ensure that employees are happy with what they are doing. In addition, Venkataraman noted demand and supply is a problem for many organizations, but using a managed service partner can help an organization control this issue and manage technology innovations as well: "You cannot train, retrain people across technologies ... but, what you can do is shift that risk entirely to a managed serviced partner. Over time, you can get your team to get stronger and do some level of cross training."